…because I throw like a girl.

Another day (late night), another barricaded gunman. Story is the same- man gets drunk/stoned/forgets his meds, rants at the family, pulls a gun and threatens them, they manage to escape, he holes up in the house threatening to kill anyone who comes through the door. Seriously, almost every barricaded gunman call I’ve been on starts like this, and usually occurs at the worst times… middle of the night, raining, really cold or really hot. In this case, I was still getting over a nasty head cold; stuffed up and not firing on all cylinders yet. But when the phone rings at 11pm and the caller ID is the 911 center, you know what it is. You groan, and bitch, and curse fate; and then answer it to see what it is this time.

I arrived on the scene and get the story. Yeah, drunk guy; yeah, long history of problems with anger and the police; yeah, family ran out and called the cops. No idea if he’s still in the house; he hasn’t answered the phone or the bullhorn or shown himself. It’s a one story with a full, unfinished basement, and he’s armed with a rifle, the family says. We gather around the swat truck and hash out an operations order. Now, I’m still slightly dizzy from the congestion and really not feeling very convivial, so this is more of a chore than usual; but we put together a workable plan.

Plan is: Go through the unlocked front door, clear the living area and kitchen, hold on the narrow hallway to the bedrooms. He was last seen in the bedroom, so we’re expecting him to be there; but no one wants to stare down a rifle easily capable of zipping through our body armor. So, before clearing the bedrooms, we plan to toss a flash-bang down the hallway and clear the rooms, holding on the stairs to the basement. Then another banger down the stairs and clear the basement.

Flash-bangs, more properly known as “noise-light distractions devices” (but what an ungainly mouthful), are designed to disrupt that OODA cycle we mentioned in an earlier post. They produce an 8 million candela flash, a 170 decibel bang, and a nice bit of overpressure. You feel a good hard thump in the chest, your ears are ringing (and in some cases subject to vertigo from inner ear imbalance), and you’ve got nothing but a huge orange spot in front of your eyes. Even if you’re expecting it, it’s quite disorienting, and gives a tactical team a few precious seconds to get in and get the person controlled. They’ve got a 1.5 to 2 second fuse, so there’s very little time from their appearance to their performance.

So, the initial entry goes fine. Through the front door, kitchen and living area cleared in seconds, team stacked on the hallway. I tug a CTS flashbang from my vest and line up for the underhanded lob into the hallway.

…except there’s a team member in my way. I move to the side, intending to lob it to his right into the hall. Pull pin, swing back, lob!

Ohhhhh, shit. My lob is too far to the right, and the bang lands on top of a bookshelf. I cry out “Short!!”-meaning a short throw, the bang is still in the room with us- and turn my back to it. The rest of the team doesn’t react to this in time.

KA-BLAAAAAM! We’ve all been exposed to flash-bangs before- in fact, our training includes everyone holding hands in a circle, eyes open, while a banger is dropped in the middle- so we know what they do and what to expect. But it’s still a shock when it happens in front of you. There goes our OODA cycle. As I had turned my back, I missed the brunt of it and turned to find the team staggering backwards. Crap. “Gogogo!” I shout and start shoving people down the hallway. Off they go, staggering like the crowd leaving a bar at closing time, bouncing off the doorframes and into the rooms.

Of course, my toss down the stairway was textbook perfect, and of course, the guy wasn’t there. He’d slipped out the back door before the first unit arrived.

Why was I never picked first for stickball, again?

You wouldn’t think of SWAT operators as psychologists, but if they’re serious about their profession, they become students of human behavior and physiological/psychological effects of stress on the body and the mind. It only makes sense, given the way SWAT operates. Ever wonder why they wear black gear, go crashing through doors, shouting their presence? It’s basic human psychology, called the OODA loop- for Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. It’s what every person does in their head when presented when something new and unusual. For example, say you’re sitting at home watching the TV, and suddenly your high school principal comes bursting through the front door, dressed in a tutu. First, you must observe what has just happened. This sounds simple, but if you were zoned out watching the TV, you might not have noticed the things that announced his presence; like noises outside the door, the dogs looking out the windows, the faint scent of madness. Then you have to orient that to what you were expecting- which, in this scenario, is probably just the next commercial. Once you’ve done that, you have to decide what to do next- punch him, grab a gun, grab a camera, grab a can of whipped cream- and then act on that decision. SWAT teams operate by disrupting that OODA cycle- shock and surprise the bad guy (through speed and violence of action and disruptions like flash-bangs and the like) so he gets stuck at Observing or Orienting and can’t Decide or Act for a few seconds. In other words, he freezes up, and gives the team the time they need to get him under control.

Unfortunately, it also works in reverse. You’d think a team executing a dangerous operation would be ready for anything… but Murphy is always there to make that anything really mean anything. Case in point…

The narcotics boys had been investigating a low-level dealer of methamphetamine. They knew where he lived and sold out of, and knew that it was a father and a son. They also knew that one of them was bedridden, but not which and not why. Armed with our search warrant, we loaded up (at this time we were bailing out of a 15-passenger van with no seats) and headed for the house.

When we arrived, we bailed out and headed swiftly for the front door. The sidewalk went in front of a row of windows, all open, before leading to the front door. We could see that a female was seated against the windows, her back to us. As we approached the front door, she saw us and screamed. Well, there goes some of the surprise factor… as the point man, I threw the door open and went in, weapon at the ready, shouting “Sheriff’s Office! Search Warrant!” at the top of my lungs. The woman was standing up from a couch, cradling an infant in her arms, but began going to the floor as I entered. You have to clear the doorway when you make an entry, to keep from bottle-necking the rest of the team and making yourself an inviting target, so I kept moving; trusting that one of the other team members would pick her up and keep an eye on her. I continued to sweep the living-room with my eyes, gazing across a hospital bed in the middle of the room, upon which rested…

Holy shit. A gelatinous blob of pink flesh covered the bed and dripped off both sides. A small coconut topped with a thatch of hair delineated a head, with two calloused, blobby feet sticking out of the other end. The only thing that moved were the two small eyes, deeply sunk in flesh, that followed our movements. A tiny yap-dog, Pomeranian or something of that ilk, snuggled against this mound of meat. A 750 pound, buck naked man lay on this bed.

That, dear readers, was absolutely the last thing I expected to see in this house. Needless to say, it derailed my OODA cycle quite handily at the Orient stage, and I stopped dead, staring at Jabba. The rest of the team ran into my back, thump-thump-thump, and the next guy in line slapped the back of my helmet; re-starting my loop. Oh, yeah; continue clearing. I moved into the kitchen to finish clearing the rest of the house.

Jabba, as it turned out, was the dealer. He kept his stash under a fold. We couldn’t take him to the jail- not only would he not survive a night in jail, we literally couldn’t get him out of the door without cutting through the wall. We finally got a judge to sign an OR- “released on own recognizance”- bond and left him there. He sure as hell wasn’t gonna run away.

Just goes to show that even when you’re prepared for anything, there’s always something you won’t expect.

S.W.A.T. Sounds impressive. Conjures up images of steely-eyed, square-jawed, resolute men in black gear kicking in doors, rolling across the ground and coming up with pistols at the ready, and generally doing in the bad guys with panache and manly, testosterone-laden gusto.

Weeeeeellllll…. sort of. Every agency wants a SWAT team, if only for the cool factor. There is a need for them- the old saw is that when the police need to be bailed out of a dangerous situation, they call SWAT. And the tactical guys do have the training, experience, and equipment to deal with situations that the ordinary patrol cop isn’t prepared to handle- high-risk search warrants against violent felons, barricaded gunmen, active shooters, and hostage rescue. But the reality can get pretty far from Hollywood’s fantasies.

For one thing, no one regulates SWAT teams. Any agency with a few guys and some black nomex can throw bodies in the back of a van and call it a SWAT team; and, unfortunately, some do. The smaller the agency, the more likely that is. The reason is largely financial. Smaller agencies can’t afford the overtime salary for extra training, the ammunition costs (which can be quite substantial- 1000 rounds per month per operator is barely sufficient to keep the level of marksmanship skill required; at $334/1000 rounds, $3340 for a ten man team per month, $40,080 per year just for practice ammo for the swat team), the equipment costs… so the teams don’t get the training they need, never really gel as a working team, and it shows in their performance. Mid-sized agencies (100-500 employees) are in the grey area of being able to field a really respectable team if they play their cards right. Large and metro agencies are really the only ones who can afford to have those teams operate full-time.

But, I’ve had the honor of serving on two different mid-size agency SWAT teams that, for all their problems, worked well as a team and got the job done despite the budget handicaps. Working as a team in this respect means a lot more than corporate teamwork. When you and a teammate enter a room to clear it of hostiles, you each take half the room as your own. You have to know that the guy going in the room with you has got his half of the room and you’re not going to get shot in the back. You have to trust him to shoot a target one foot from you without error, if it came to that. When you get a team that works that well together, you’ve got a formidable tactical unit.

This isn’t to say that things always go smoothly. Ooohh, no; far from it. Murphy, in the title of this post, is “Murphy’s Law” Murphy: Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. And even in the world of meticulously planned tactical operations with highly trained and competent tactical operators, Murphy’s always around the corner, ready to screw up your operation. And I’ve got countless examples of those.

And, since A) I’m never one to turn down a teaching opportunity; B) I haven’t got any pride; if an embarrassing screw-up can be used to emphasize a teaching point, I’ll tell stories on myself; and C) some of them are pretty funny; I’ll relate some of them to you. Posts with “Murphy” in the title will probably have one or more of these stories. This one isn’t exactly a “Murphy”, per se; but I found myself thinking about it last night.

Most of our tactical operations were in support of the Narcotics unit as high-risk search warrants. When the drug boys developed a suspect and got enough for a search and/or arrest warrant, they did a risk assessment on him- prior criminal history, history of violent acts, possession of weapons and propensity to use them, fortifications, surveillance, etc. etc. If the risk assessment scores high enough, they bring in the SWAT team to execute the warrant. This one was no different; a fairly low-level drug dealer known to have weapons and a violent past living in a one-story three-bedroom with his wife and child. We planned the warrant for early in the morning, to catch him in bed (and therefore less likely to react quickly) and suited up. Door is breached quickly, team enters and spreads out, calling out “Sheriff! Search warrant!” at the top of our voices. The den and kitchen area are cleared in seconds and the team enters the hallway with the bedrooms. I get to the master bedroom door with my second- it’s locked, but he gives it a good kick and it comes open right away. The wife is standing by the door in a nightie; and, instead of being hysterical and screaming like most, is standing there rather dejected, hands in the air, a “not this again” look on her face, as if this were a common occurrence for her. Well, married to a drug dealer, it probably was. My second got her proned out for handcuffing while I focused my attention on the husband, standing on the other side of the bed, naked as the day he was born. He had his hands up as I started to approach him from across the room, keeping my MP5 subgun in a high-ready position, yelling at him to get on the ground.

And get on the ground he starts to do… and then he lunges under the bed and out of sight. The first thing that pops into my head as he disappears is that he’s going for a weapon and I suck my BDU pants up my asshole. He pops up again, right into my sights, and I see he’s got a baggie and not a gun, and my finger slackens up off the trigger…

Crap! He grabbed his stash bag and ran for the toilet to flush it. I dropped the MP5 to hang on its sling and ran after him into the bathroom. He’d dropped the bag in the toilet and was reaching for the handle. I tackled him across the chest, got an arm under his chin, and started pulling him away from the toilet into the tub behind me. He was gripping the toilet bowl, trying to pull himself forward enough to flush. Gripping so hard, in fact, that he moved the toilet enough to break the water supply line behind the wall. We stayed at this impasse for what seemed like minutes (in reality, more like 8-10 seconds); him straining to reach the handle and me straining to pull him back while calling for a “second” at the top of my lungs. When a team member made it into the bathroom to help, the first thing he did was start laughing.

OK, fine, so seeing me wrestle a naked guy off a toilet is amusing, but can you give me a hand here? We got the guy subdued and handcuffed and fished his drugs out of the toilet, and my second finally told me why he was laughing. Seems that while the MP5 was hanging from it’s sling while I was sprawled out with the naked bad guy, the muzzle of the subgun was resting on the head of the bad guy’s penis. Had he tried to grab my gun, he probably would have blown his johnson off.

Aaaah, all in a day’s work.